A final note is that no one is denying that Vitamin D deficiency is very highly correlated with bad Covid-19 outcomes. The world in which Vitamin D supplementation doesn’t help is the world in where there holds some combination of (A) [...]
Thus, if you go to the doctor and they measure your Vitamin D levels as sufficient, that definitely is very good Covid-risk news for you personally. If they measure your levels as insufficient, that definitely is very bad Covid-risk news for you personally.
IIRC Scott offers at least one other explanation E), namely that illness might reduce your Vitamin D levels. Hence low Vitamin D level would be a symptom of the illness, without implying that starting with a higher vitamin D level would’ve helped against it. From this perspective, low vitamin D level is weak Bayesian evidence for having Covid, but presumably you can’t just take vitamin D to change that.
This scenario reminds me of the hypothesis in Why We Get Sick (paraphrasing from memory) that low iron levels in pregnant women were not necessarily a problem to be remedied via iron supplements, but could instead be an evolutionary mechanism to deprive bacteria of crucial resources to decrease risk of illness during pregnany.
Also worth noting that Ada got the majority of his funding from the Gates Foundation, so they did end up helping build useful capacity in at least one case.
Nitpicking: The original article says “Of the $800m (£579m) we needed, we put in $270m and the rest we raised from the Gates Foundation and various countries.”, which implies they got the majority of their money from elsewhere, but not that it was all from the Gates Foundation, which may or may not have provided a majority of the funding.
Digging deeper: The Gates Foundation website lists a direct grant of $4m, and this article mentions a $150m grant which should be this one by the Foundation, but which only happened in December 2020, leaving me confused regarding the timeline in the original interview. Maybe of the $800m they needed, they got other funding first, or they only needed most of the funding for the final step of scaling up production? And I guess they might have contributed more to the Institute in other grants I didn’t find; their grant payments database lists 466 potentially Covid-related grants since 2020.
I remember reading it as the Gates Foundation doing a lot more than that, but it would fit with my look into Gates before if they only gave 4mm, at which point they don’t get much credit here given their stated intentions.
It should be counted as granting $154m, though, since the $150m grant was a grant to a third party that then went to the Serum Institute, too. Not that I understand why they did it that way, but I guess that can be chalked up to charity bureaucracy or something.
Though if you mean to say that making grants in December 2020 don’t have the same weight as they would’ve had half a year earlier, that’s a point well-taken.
IIRC Scott offers at least one other explanation E), namely that illness might reduce your Vitamin D levels. Hence low Vitamin D level would be a symptom of the illness, without implying that starting with a higher vitamin D level would’ve helped against it. From this perspective, low vitamin D level is weak Bayesian evidence for having Covid, but presumably you can’t just take vitamin D to change that.
This scenario reminds me of the hypothesis in Why We Get Sick (paraphrasing from memory) that low iron levels in pregnant women were not necessarily a problem to be remedied via iron supplements, but could instead be an evolutionary mechanism to deprive bacteria of crucial resources to decrease risk of illness during pregnany.
Nitpicking: The original article says “Of the $800m (£579m) we needed, we put in $270m and the rest we raised from the Gates Foundation and various countries.”, which implies they got the majority of their money from elsewhere, but not that it was all from the Gates Foundation, which may or may not have provided a majority of the funding.
Digging deeper: The Gates Foundation website lists a direct grant of $4m, and this article mentions a $150m grant which should be this one by the Foundation, but which only happened in December 2020, leaving me confused regarding the timeline in the original interview. Maybe of the $800m they needed, they got other funding first, or they only needed most of the funding for the final step of scaling up production? And I guess they might have contributed more to the Institute in other grants I didn’t find; their grant payments database lists 466 potentially Covid-related grants since 2020.
I remember reading it as the Gates Foundation doing a lot more than that, but it would fit with my look into Gates before if they only gave 4mm, at which point they don’t get much credit here given their stated intentions.
It should be counted as granting $154m, though, since the $150m grant was a grant to a third party that then went to the Serum Institute, too. Not that I understand why they did it that way, but I guess that can be chalked up to charity bureaucracy or something.
Though if you mean to say that making grants in December 2020 don’t have the same weight as they would’ve had half a year earlier, that’s a point well-taken.